by Edith Layton
“Arden,” Julian said earnestly, angry at his friend’s estimate of himself, for whatever his past, he’d been one of the most decent and honorable men he’d ever known, “you’re no one’s inferior, and whatever your background, I believe you could win your pick of wives, from the most dewy misses to the most upright matrons in England.”
“Oh, good, I did hope you’d say that,” Arden answered with great eagerness, “so I believe I’ll toss Mrs. Devlin over and have a go at Princess Charlotte. She’ll shed that Dutchman like a shot if I hint she can have me—is that what you’re saying, I hope?
“No, no,” he said, as Julian laughed again, “it’s the Widow Devlin for me, for a multiplicity of reasons, not the least of which is that I believe I’m better suited for a widow—some experienced and clever lady who’s done with ‘true’ love and is more than willing to settle for security and some mutually interesting passion. Despite your adoration, my friend, I’m not such a bargain for some virginal ‘dewy’ miss. At that, I can’t for the life of me see that having such wetness in bed is any great treat. I scarcely want an infant just out of diapers in my sheets—how perverse, Julian,” he said with admiration, glancing to his friend, “I am impressed. But aside from the obvious matters of expertise, I’m too jaded a hack for a novice driver, and too devious myself to tolerate an innocent for longer than an hour, even in verbal sorts of intercourse.”
“And yet,” Julian said, puzzled, “you’ll still go downstairs tonight for all the world as if you’re set on courting that pretty idiot Cee-cee Deems?”
“Certainly,” Arden said in surprise. “Why, you don’t think the crafty Deemses would stay on here at this rural hotel and gambling palace otherwise, do you? Or do you believe they’re so charitable they’d remain all this time so that the wealthy gentleman they’ve their eye on can have a chance to court their daughter’s companion? I’m amazingly lazy—like my soulmate Falstaff, ‘I’d rather be eaten to death with rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion’—and I don’t feel like chasing my lady the length and breadth of the Continent, you know.”
Seeing Julian’s raised eyebrow, he went on more thoughtfully, “And too, I do believe I get to see her more when she thinks she’s spoiling my chances at despoiling her innocent than I would were I to come out and declare myself to her. That, I must take time and care to do. She’s clever, Mrs. Devlin. She don’t trust me as far as she can throw me. Although,” he said, smiling with affectionate remembrance as he clapped his friend on the shoulder and they went to the door, “I don’t doubt she’d be very surprised to know just how far she’s already done that.”
*
The Baron Wyndham scarcely had a word for his daughter, he was in such a state of high excitation that his normally pale face showed a ruddiness to suggest he’d been out-of-doors for all this cool spring day. But the rash, oddly distributed patches of color on his cheeks and on his neck gave the lie to that, and the rest of his countenance looked exactly as a devout gamester’s should, pallid from the bleaching of a hundred nights beneath blazing chandeliers, rather than so much as a day’s ride in the wan sunshine. His hands shook as he lifted his wineglass to his lips, but it was not that sort of spirits that made them tremble.
Arden narrowed his eyes as he noted all the signs of the man’s excitement, and when he looked to Francesca, as she seemed to be earnestly attempting to convince her father of something in this hour before dinner as the guests stood and chatted in the main salon, he was suffused with a deep and sudden pity for her. For the baron was obviously not listening to her or even thinking of his coming dinner. He was, as he’d been the night before, and the night before that, on fire to go to the tables again—any table: for dicing, or a spin at the wheel of fortune, or the turn of the cards would do for him. He’d won at everything for a succession of days, and doubtless was telling his daughter how right he was in attempting to use that newly got money to get more money and increase their fortunes while his luck held, for she nodded at last, and seemed hesitantly acquiescent. But Arden grieved for her complaisance. As a man who knew the many ways in which men indulged their many weaknesses, he knew the baron was as eager to lose as he was to win now. It was the play itself that was the point of the game for such men, Arden thought as he watched Francesca, before he tried to decide when he could make his own next move tonight.
Tonight, he was all eyes for her every move, although anyone watching him as he sat at dinner with the Deemses, Francesca and her father, and Julian and Roxanne Cobb, would have thought he’d no care for anyone but the charming young fair-haired girl who’d been maneuvered to sit at his side. And tonight he made sure to be all ears, as well, though anyone observing him would scarcely have thought it as he told his droll stories and met the viscount’s humorous observations with his own absurd commentary. And tonight, since all his thoughts were about love, or variant substitutes for it, he was remembering his own past one, although for all the world he seemed to be interested in nothing but the present. But he was an amazingly versatile gentleman, to his regret, for he could dwell on the past even as he prepared for the future. Indeed, he could scarcely help it, though he often wished he could.
For remembering Meggie still caused him grief, though the boy that had known her was as lost to him as she was now, and she, poor child, had been dust for a generation of men. And she had been a child. Meeting that lost infant today had brought that back to him clearly. She’d been a few years older than that waif, of course, but now, looking back, he was ashamed to think of what a babe she’d been, only fifteen when he’d met her, only sixteen when she’d died. But that, he reminded himself, was this ancient three-and thirty-year-old gentleman’s conscience speaking, a conscience that would deservedly have been shamed for bedding such a girl. The boy who had loved her, the boy he’d been, had been sixteen when he’d met her, and a hundred when she died.
Although in some ways she’d always been older than he was, he remembered. She’d led him from the moment they’d met, leading him to a safe place to sleep out of the street after she’d come upon him hunched in a doorway, trying to make himself comfortable enough to doze off for a few moments. Leading him into the twisting alleyways of St. Giles, away from predators that would have twisted him or torn him and robbed him of more than his meager supply of money or his enormous innocence, despite his already impressive size, for he’d been innocent of her city then. And leading him to her own bed in time, to show him what physical love was, teaching him far too well, so that he’d never forget that the physical act was only half the pleasure, and love that made it beyond pleasure.
Not that she’d known very much more about it than he learned in their first hour. For all her experience, and it was considerable, since she’d been selling her spare body in the streets for six years before they’d met, the nature of that occupation, of course, had been such that she couldn’t teach him very much about the ways of a man with a maid beyond the direct act. But in those months they’d been together, his own love and concern for her had taught him far more, for it showed them both the role that gentleness and consideration and desire for the other’s pleasure could bring to that basic moment.
Meggie had introduced him to less gentle arts as well, for she’d shown him the skills he’d needed for survival. She showed him how a bitter runaway boy could stay alive in those lowest of London’s gutters. And after he’d learned that honest labor paid little, he’d discovered the thousand other ways to earn money there at the bottom level of mankind. His strength and size helped him perform a dozen tasks where a broad back and a strong stomach could earn enough to fill their empty stomachs. But before long he’d seen that a clever mind could make more, and it took little more time to understand that nothing could earn a man as much as a clever mind and a strong back, and an acceptance that fine principles were a luxury he’d have to earn, and then, at last, he’d been able to keep them both in fine style.
They’d made quite a pair. Odd, mated and mismatc
hed ginger twins. She as diminutive as he was large. Bone-thin but bonny, with a thatch of taffy hair and a raft of freckles he teased her about. And a smile that was so wide and infectious it redeemed that plain, tough little face that touched his heart so completely that with all the money he’d earned, and the opportunities it had bought him, he’d never bought one since he’d met her. For he’d never thought another female lovelier then. Or since.
It had all come too late for her, of course. She’d flowered quickly, growing up between the cracks in the grimy paving stones of London’s worst stews. But it had been a forced, unhealthy growth, and all the warmth and comfort and good food he’d been able to provide her hadn’t been able to compensate for those years of privation. She’d begun to cough one winter day, and like a wise woman with child in the earliest moments, had known from the first feeble stirrings within her what it was that she carried—not a life beneath her heart, but a death that shivered directly within her thin chest. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t fought it, perhaps she couldn’t have fought any harder, for all it had taken her so quickly. And the greatest gift he’d given her at the end, it seemed, had been the tears he’d fought so valiantly to hold back, for she’d touched them on his cheeks and sighed in wonder, and told him that no one had ever cried for her, never, and she was that sorry for him, but that proud.
He’d left then. Gone back to where he’d run from, having learned that there were far worse things to bear, and having borne them. Having learned mostly the value of all sorts of education. Now he was a fine gent, and here he sat in a luxury hotel in the heart of France, well-traveled, well-breeched, well-educated in a great many things, the sort of a toff whose purse she’d have been proud to have lifted. Much good it did him. For she’d left a void the years hadn’t filled.
He wasn’t a sentimental idiot. He knew very well that if he could transcend time and death as the poets he loved to read often did, and could return to her, he wouldn’t have had a thing to say to her, nor a thought in common any longer. Indeed, though she’d been sharp and knowing, even then their youth and their need were really all they’d had together. And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about her, even as he planned how to offer another female his name for the rest of his life. For she’d really loved him, and loved him entirely, and he’d never doubted it.
But Francesca Devlin, he thought, wrenching his thoughts entirely back to the present by main force, really needed him. And that, he decided, was almost as good.
He didn’t take his eyes from her all night, although he never looked at her directly. He knew well enough he couldn’t stalk if his prey caught him at it. He stayed downwind from her at the dinner table, showing his white teeth in laughter at everything his dinner companions said, and listening to Cecily Deems’ light prattle with the interest of a grandfather with his first grandchild. Mrs. Deems swelled with happiness, even Mr. Deems grew a slight ghost of a grin, and yet Arden never missed a thing that Francesca did, nor a word she said.
Not that she said much. She was unusually still tonight. She was trying so valiantly to act normally with Roxanne, seeing the blond widow for the first time since her disappearance with the viscount, or at least, she thought wretchedly, seeing her fully dressed for the first time, that she failed utterly and chatted with her with all the ease she’d have felt if it were the queen come to dinner. And when Roxanne, amused and proud, but finally bored, turned to join in with the gentlemen in their more lively conversation, Francesca sank back into thoughts of Harry again, only jumping up with a start when she thought in her distraction that Julian was a mind-reader when he said “Devlin.” She relaxed when she discovered he was only asking her if she’d like another slice of the excellent beef she’d evidently cleared her plate of, without tasting a morsel of it.
So, of course, she’d no awareness of being so carefully observed, just as she’d not the slightest idea of how she was being studied later, as she sat and seemed to watch Cecily trying to learn a simple version of euchre from Arden Lyons. And after she’d endured an evening of that, and then seen Cee-cee to bed, and had come down again to fidget and fret for her father’s gaming, and had seen the viscount and Roxanne think they were subtly stealing away together, she’d no inkling of how she was being circled. And when her father completely ignored her and she stepped out of the crowded main salon to wait for him in a cool anteroom, she’d not the smallest notion of how she’d been tracked, with padded tread, to her corner.
Her thoughts were so bedeviled that when she heard a slight cough and looked up to find Arden standing next to her, she was genuinely glad to see a real and familiar face. And for the first time, jolted from thinking of Harry and the shock she’d had from him that morning, she looked up at Arden with some real pleasure, although she was grateful he didn’t know it was only because she’d decided it was better to pass time with the devil she knew than the one she didn’t. But he might have suspected it. For his tawny eyes lit with amusement as well as interest as he took a seat beside her.
“Gambling hells,” he said ruminatively, without preface, “are much like wedding nights, are they not? In that,” he continued, without waiting for an answer, “they aren’t much fun unless you’re participating in what they are best at providing. I could name some other, less tame analogies, and will, you know,” he threatened amiably, “if you don’t say something soon, or at least acknowledge my wickedness by flying into a huff. I was trying to shock you out of the sullens, you see,” he said as she began to grow a little grin despite herself. “Ah, yes. There’s nothing like naughtiness to get a proper female’s mind off her own problems and onto creating someone else’s. Oh, better,” he approved as she laughed at last.
“I wasn’t sulking,” she said, and he amazed her by interrupting and nodding as he said, “I know, you were remembering.
“Come along,” he said then, rising and offering his hand, “you’ve a shawl, you’ll need no more, it’s a mild night, let’s perambulate. There’s a poor kitchen garden at back,” and when she started at the reference, he misunderstood, smiled ruefully, and said, “But I won’t entice you into the back garden for my seduction, I’ll ask you to walk out into the front drive and down to the road for that. And,” he said, holding out his hand imperatively, “for the purposes of blowing away the clouds of tobacco, candle smoke, and blue dismals that have settled, wraithlike, about your head.”
She took his hand, and rose, without another question.
It was cool, and quiet, and the further they walked down the gravel path that led from the circular gravel drive in front of the manor house, the dimmer both the torchlights in front of the house and the sounds from within it grew, as their footsteps crunching the gravel beneath them became louder and the stars waxed brighter above them. She walked at his side and drank in great gulps of the tart, sweet air, and then, feeling that she was coming alive again, if only because she was moving again, and in caring human company again, and out in the clean air again, she sighed deeply and said, “Thank you.”
“I bottled it expressly for you,” he answered, his voice a low rumble above her. “I’m pleased you like it. Two parts earth and a fraction of rain, a soupcon of brine, from the west, from the sea, and just a touch, no more or the effect would be ruined, mind, of early violets. Not so heady as mid-May, or near so intoxicating as June, but for our purposes, a presumptuous little brew and more than adequate, isn’t it?”
She smiled a reply that she remembered he couldn’t see, but before she could speak again, he did.
“One of the advantages,” he said conversationally, “if not the only one, of being my size is that I can be of enormous help to ladies in distress. There used to be a great many more things a fellow like me could do on your behalf, of course, but even though they’ve decimated the supply of dragons, and ogres are not too active this time of year, I still have my uses. Is there anyone you’d like me to thrash for you?” he asked hopefully, peering down at her. “Any insult I can avenge? You’ll note I do hav
e more than an adequate shoulder to cry on—indeed, a legion of depressed ladies could gather there for a good lament. How may I help?” he asked in a less jocular manner.
“Thank you,” she said again, sincerely again, “but there’s no way, I’m afraid. There’s nothing that you can do, but thank you.”
Her husky voice always enchanted him, but when she spoke, there’d been an odd catch in it that caused him to stop in his paces. It was time.
“It’s your Harry, isn’t it?” he asked softly.
Afraid to answer, afraid to look up to him, she could only nod, for he’d no idea of exactly how right he was.
“It is,” she managed finally, when he stopped and waited for her to speak.
They stood alone in a corner of the graveled drive, and though there was no other living being in sight or within call, she was not in the least afraid of him. In fact, she might well have been a bit fearful of the complete darkness of the profound night surrounding them, and of what real or imagined dangers might lurk in it—she’d always been foolishly afraid of the dark—but his large frame reassured her. It would indeed have taken a dragon to overwhelm him. No, now she was only terrified of herself, and how very much she wanted to confide in him.
